Politico offers some "hard questions" that might conceivably be asked. But the questions, as phrased chez Politico, all sound softened to me. If they're soft on paper under a link-begging headline about hardness, how can we hope for any toughness face-to-face with the President who's been withholding press conferences for 8 months?

Here are the Petraeus-related questions:

Do you believe the FBI should have told you and Congress sooner about the investigation that led Gen. Petraeus to resign?

Do you worry about a culture in which trusted officials behave badly?

Does this administration consider anyone who’s having an extramarital affair, or has had one in the past, to be unfit for public office?

Easy: yes, yes, no. Add a few mushy words and you're done. Instapundit notes that Question 1 "lets Obama off the hook by pretending to believe that he didn’t know anything about Petraeus until after the election, which is quite implausible." It's like the old "When did you stop beating your wife?" question, assuming a fact not yet proved, but the assumed fact is helpful to the witness. The witness is in no danger of getting tripped up, letting the negative assumption go. He'll notice the positive assumption, silently celebrate, and proceed to answer the question asked.

The Obama administration has treated the press like shit ever since it was just the Obama campaign, and the press has gone along with it.

Why? If you haven't guessed from the dismal financial performance of their papers & networks, the purpose of most of the press now is to be ideological sounding boards. So, those guys in the WH press corps are doing their jobs in spite of no conference in 8 months. Their job never was to reveal the workings of the Obama admin to the American people. It was always to shill for it.

Update (5:53 PM ET): President Barack Obama reportedly refused to provide a direct answer to repeated questions on whether requests for help in Benghazi were denied as the attack was underway during an interview with 9News in Denver on Friday.

Kyle Clark, a reporter with 9News, asked the president about the requests for help and whether or not it was fair to make Americans wait for answers on Benghazi until after the election.

“The election has nothing to do with four brave Americans getting killed and us wanting to find out exactly what happened,” Obama said. “Nobody wants to find out more what happened than I do.”

The Press will ask him sofball questions and Obama will lie his ass off and basically answer "fuck you that is why" and the Obama supporters will love it.

It is more than a bit ironic that the every people who have spent the last 40 years calling everyone "fascist" jumped on the first real fascist cult of personality to come along. People like Shilow and Jake Diamond love nothing better than a strong dear leader to look after them and give them an excuse to hate the other.

Why was the Senate Intelligence committee kept in the dark about the affair?

Who made the decision not to tell the Senate Intelligence Committee?

Was there a political calculation that the Senate Intelligence committe should be kept in the dark because there are Republicans on the committee?

Paula Broadwell said at a speech at the University of Denver that the CIA annex might be holding prisoners. Now the video of the speech has been pulled down from youtube. Can you confirm or deny whether there was prisoners kept in Benghazi?

What was the CIA doing in Benghazi?

Why was there no security for the ambassador when he is right next door to a CIA facility?

Who made the decison to not send military aid to our embassy that is under attack?

And yes Obama should be asked point blank when he was informed of the Petreus issue and why Holder waited so long to tell him. Obama should be forced to lie in public and on the record and not be allowed to let his minions lie for him.

Isn't it also interesting that the best these very powerful men could do in terms of women are 40ish women of modest good looks (although with interesting backgrounds)? I suppose available women might be limited for guys in the military, but neither Broadwell nor Kelley seem to be terribly attractive. Broadhouse seems pretty bright. Kelley seems like an idiot - she made a 911 call yesterday claiming some diplomatic inviolabiliy [whateve that means] because the press was on her lawn.

I just want to know what Obama knows and when he knew what he knows. There are known knowns and things we think we know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know. In that case it would be impossible to know when we knew?

I've worked on computer systems for the FBI and I've worked in the intelligence community.

Hypothetical: You are the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with legal responsibility for counterintelligence operations on American soil. You have information, not yet confirmed but at least plausible and perhaps even probable, to the effect that the Director of Central Intelligence is engaged in an affair that may also be a honey trap of sorts. And yet you decide not to tell the President of the United States? This is not plausible, nor is it consistent with the professionalism of the men and women I worked with back in the day.

Thank you garage for confimring that there no circumstances in which you would ever hold Obama accountable for anything or really even ask him to explain himself. What is it like being a part of a fascist cult of personality? Did you want to be that when you were a kid? Did you ever think you would join such a thing or has it always been something you knew you wanted to do?

If there were no national security issues involved, where is the FBI's warrant to look at those emails?

The only way they could have legally looked at the e-mails sans warrant is for it to have been a national security investigation. Since they didn't' have a warrant, they are either lying or violated the law.

Shiloh the partisan hack said:"Dear Willard, won't you come out to play

Apologies to John Lennon."

Let me get this straight: You think that, since Romney (in our opinion) dodged the media during the campaign, it is OK for bHo to not answer any hard questions during his first press conference in many moons? Are you this big of an idiot?

Is there a pattern here? McChrystal, Petraeus, and Allen all commanded our forces in Afghanistan and all saw their careers wrecked. Thank God we have John Kerry waiting in the wings. He will restore morale among the troops and initiate a winning strategy in A-stan....I think this will be a fairly easy scandal for the President to dodge. Just as the President has men whose job it is to tell them things, he also has men whose job it is to deny they ever told him things. I suppose the FBI can say that they weren't investigating Petraeus but the two flaky women who were fighting each other.....To date, the following organizations have had their reputations tarnished: the FBI, the CIA, the Army high command. Perhaps the Attorney General's office and the State Department will catch more flack, but it hasn't happened yet.

Last thing I remember the last four years is a press than "loved" the President. It seemed like every news story in my state was about the "Tea Party" and every bit of economic good news was followed by the inevitable dark cloud qualification. And after watching Bush/Cheney get nothing but softball questions for at least 6 of their 8 years it really brought home who owns the press... large corporations like Disney and Fox and they are anything but liberal.

On election night Ann said something to the effect that she was reconnecting to her "old" (read authentic?) aversion to politics. (Also something about wanting to get back to love and beauty.) Seemed like a bit of a cop out--the aversion appeared when the outcome didn't go the way Ann thought/hoped/wanted. But I gave Althouse the benefit of the doubt what with the art background, leaving the big firm for academia, etc.

But in the days after the election, with a juicy political scandal blooming, love and beauty are on hold: politics front and center. Seems convenient.

P.S. I'm trying to out-Althouse Althouse by constructing a narrative that's against the grain.

Another importent question, ARM, is why his administration isn't reporting information like Fast & Furious, Requests for security from the Ambassador in Libya, urgent requests for life-saving assistance from CIA operatives in Libya, FBI investigations into CIA Director's private affairs due to national security implications, etc...

Are you really embracing the notion that President Obama is so incompetent that his subordinates keep him uninformed and he doesn't realize it? Or doesn't care? Or is too incompetent to fix it after the first 5 times it happened?

It is one or the other:Either he is lying to avoid responsibility, or he really doesn't know and is the worst leader this nation has ever had.

And neither you nor the press seems to care about malfeasance or incompetence, as long as the POTUS is a Democrat.

I thought one of the things Obama was going to do was bring transparency to the White House. Leaving aside the idea that we were goi g to see the bills and have negotiations broadcast on CSpan (but Mitt Romnry was the one who Kept changing his positions and couldn't be trusted!) this extends to his interaction with the media as well. He's certainly been one of the more alloof presidents in modern times.

And it's largely gone unremarked by the media. Were it Bush's White House There would be stories every singleday and calls demanding answers for everything.

Yet now, just as liberals have lost their ability to speak truth to power, so too has the press lost its ability to follow leads (note the Times deliberately burying stories about Benghazi because they might impact the election) or even question why Obama can get away with not having press conferences for long periods ofTime.

Who, what, when, where, why, and how. Any question that starts "Do you think..." is a pathetic, touchy-feely question in which the questioner is actually expressing his own idea. Press people often now ask questions in this vein: "How excited are you about ____________?" It makes me sick.